Alchemised

by SenLinYu

“The Undying. You’re his source of power, and the Resistance—we figured that out, didn’t we? How to kill him. How to kill all of you.”

Things that seem too good to be true usually have a price you don’t know about until it’s too late.”

She thought she should say something. What she’d tried to tell Lancaster. “Ferron always comes for me,” she whispered.

Ferron will come. Ferron will come.

“Oh, Marino.” His thumb trailed along her neck, following the scar below her jaw. “If I’d known what pain you’d cause me, I never would have taken you.” He sighed, and she could smell the liquor on his breath as his head dipped closer. She had no idea what he meant, if she was supposed to apologise. “But at this point I suppose I deserve to burn. I wonder if you’ll burn, too.” His face was so close the words brushed against her lips, and his mouth crashed against hers.

Trapped in Spirefell, she was latching on to any glimpse of kindness, any sense of tenderness her mind could fabricate. But it wasn’t kindness. He wasn’t kind; he simply wasn’t cruel. He wasn’t as monstrous as he could be. And for Helena’s fracturing mind, an absence of cruelty was sufficient solace. For her starved heart, it was enough.

What you can’t bear is the isolation. The Eternal Flame’s lonely little healer, with no one left to save. No one needs you, and no one wants you.”

“That’s all this is. You can’t bear being alone. You’ll do anything for the people who’ll let you love them.”

“Let me be very clear, then. I don’t want you. I never wanted you. I am not your friend. There is nothing I want more than the moment I’m finally done with you.”

Don’t break. She’d promised…

“I’m waiting—I promised I’d wait—”

“You’re mine. You swore yourself to me.”

“I have warned you, if something happens to you, I will personally raze the Eternal Flame. That isn’t a threat. It is a promise. Consider your survival as much a necessity to the Resistance as Holdfast’s. If you die, I will kill every single one of them.”

I’m sorry. I was trying to save you. I didn’t mean to do this to you.

“He wants you, Marino,” Crowther said. “Both now and after the war.”

Become so obsessed with finding my vulnerabilities that you don’t notice the ones I’m making in you.

“I swear it, on the spirits of the five gods and my own soul, Kaine Ferron, I’m yours as long as I live.”

Ferron stared at her, his mouth twisting. “Are you wanting a confession? Shall I tell you everything I’ve done?” She stared into his mocking eyes. “Do you want to?”

She only needed him to realise he wanted to tell someone— —that he wanted to tell her.

“It would be too real for you, wouldn’t it? If it was someone you knew. I think that’s why you haven’t. You’re afraid I’ll mess with those clear lines, so you’re making up all these excuses about needing to train me.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, breaking the tense silence. “I shouldn’t have said that last week. I lost my head. I’ll do—whatever you want to make it up to you.”

“Do you leer at and fondle all your unconscious patients, or am I special?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t heal this.”

“I’m sorry.” “Shut up!”

“Don’t die, Marino. I might miss you.”

The hospital massacres had been the first major atrocity in the war. Apollo’s assassination had been devastating, but the massacres were when it all became irrevocably real. The Undying followed no rules. It was not an “honourable” war. Morrough wanted people to be afraid or dead. The Guild Assembly defended the attacks, saying that the hospitals were run by the Eternal Flame as covers for military bases, and the surrounding countries swallowed the lie, because it was easier than involving themselves in Paladia’s conflict.

Her anger reignited. “You have no idea how hard it is to save someone, to fix all the ways the people like you break them.” She glared at him. “I hope someday you have to try. See how little you think of it then.”

They are obsessive about what they regard to be theirs. You do this and Kaine Ferron will never let you go, and he will not be content with being secondary to anyone.”

She couldn’t fix herself anymore, and no one else seemed inclined to even notice she was breaking.

“I must admit,” he said in a low voice as though making a confession, “if anyone had told me you’d become so lovely, I would never have come near you. I was rather blindsided when I saw you again.”

“You’re like a rose in a graveyard,” he said, and his lips twisted into a bitter smile. “I wonder what you could have turned into without the war.”

“He said alchemists were like surgeons, so we have to take care of our hands.”

“You made me feel like the parts of me that aren’t useful still deserve to exist. Like I’m not just all the things I can do.”

People always said there was no greater temptation than the forbidden.

You’re being driven by the guilt over crimes you never committed, that you think you deserve to suffer for, and that’s making you a liability for me.”

Her death count was the numerical representation of her failures. All the lives she hadn’t saved, the ways she fell short. For Kaine, it was a mark of power. His victims, even Principate Apollo, all represented what made him so valuable. They were the inverse and counter to each other. A healer and killer, circling slowly, the push and pull inexorable.

“You know, I just realised, if I succeed, you’ll control Ferron the same way you use Luc to control me. It makes me feel rather sorry for him.” Ilva didn’t look at her. “Well, he’ll deserve it more than you do.”

“I’m sorry…” Luc said, his voice barely more than a whisper. “I lost my head when I saw it take her.”

I can’t taste anything now except blood and smoke, and I don’t feel anything except when I’m on fire. The stories made it sound so good. Fighting for a cause. Being a hero.” He shook his head. “Why does everyone pretend it’s anything like that?” Helena reached out, fingers brushing against his shoulder, not sure what to say, how to comfort him. “Maybe that’s what they had to tell themselves, to live with it. Maybe it’s all they let themselves remember,” Helena said, but she, too, wondered that anyone who’d seen war’s true face would let it be so gilded.

“I live among idealists, but all I see are bodies. I’d like the opinion of someone who doesn’t believe that optimism somehow improves the odds.”

“The High Necromancer will do whatever it takes to win. The method doesn’t matter. He wants Paladia, ideally with the city intact, but if he can’t get it, he’ll raze it instead. You’re fighting someone whose only objection to genocide is the waste of potential resources. Even a genocide is acceptable if it leaves him with the materials for more necrothralls. And you’re trying to win by—what? Waiting for Sol’s intervention? Is there any plan that doesn’t hinge on the inherent superiority of goodness?”

“Don’t die, Kaine,” she said. The line he walked frightened her. If the array was the punishment for a failure, what would the price of betrayal be? A smirk twisted his mouth as he looked at her. “There are far worse fates than dying, Marino.” She nodded. “I know. But that one you don’t come back from.” He gave a bitter laugh. “All right, then, but only because you asked.”

Funny how often people in power hate politics, as if what they really want is to do as they please and be praised for it, and if they aren’t, then it’s all beneath them.

Sometimes she wished she’d died in the hospital with her father, to be remembered and mourned for her possibilities, rather than live day by day growing ever lesser. Now it didn’t matter if she’d been an alchemist, or a healer, or anything else. To anyone who ever learned of it, she would only be that one thing. Women were always defined by the lowliest thing they could be called.

But worse still was knowing all that and still craving those rare moments in which he was gentle. Because that was all she had left.

“Tell the truth! You don’t get to make up history to suit your preferences. Do you realise what you’ve done? Luc thinks he’s supposed to be earning a miracle. That the reason he hasn’t already won this war is because he hasn’t suffered or been enough like Orion to earn it, and that’s his fault. But there will never be a miracle that will save us. You’re torturing him to death on a lie.”

“You don’t get to lie to me and then get angry when I make the mistake of believing you,”

“In the future, perhaps tell me what you want instead of expecting me to fail where it’s convenient to you. Maybe then we’ll both end up less disappointed in each other.”

“I heard about what happened with you and the Council. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply anything about your soul—”

She lived in the aftermath of every battle, breathed in the devastation until she was drowning in it. Nothing and no one would ever convince her that anything noble or purifying could come from this scale of suffering. That any rewards could ever be worth it.